


One Good Deed Dying Tongueless

by Prochytes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hellblazer
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 03:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10527477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: An unseen war. A teenage fugitive. An ageing mystic with a hangover. John Constantine doesn't know what's going on. It's important that he doesn't find out.





	1. By King’s Cross – St. Pancras I Lay Down and Wept

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on a defunct website in early 2005. Spoilers for _Hary Potter_ to _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ ; it does not account for developments after that. Angst, dark themes, and violence.

Something more than seven hundred years ago, a man grieved for the loss of his wife. He was an important man, a king, so wherever her body rested on the way to be buried at Westminster, he set up a monument. One of these was at what became the intersection of Pentonville Road and York Way. When they started building railways, they named the station after it.

 

Brendan always used to say that you could collar fifty of the suits who churn through King’s Cross every morning, sweating and fretting at the prospect of arriving five minutes late to the critical job of pushing paper round the planet, and not one of the ignorant little pieces of shite (his words) would know how it got its name. But names are important, all the same. No matter how much grease on the axles of the money machine pumps through it, King’s Cross is still a place of loss. Lost love. Lost hope.

 

Lost drunks.

 

Consider John Constantine, the wrong side of fifty, huddled in a doorway to keep out of the night wind – the snob wind that promenades at 2 a.m., and wipes its fingers after it touches you. Minding my own business, and that was the problem. My business would be a lot easier, and need a lot less in the way of benders, if I didn’t mind quite so much.

 

I’d been brokering some business between Danny Krentz, an old boozing mate of mine, and Big George Rooney, who ran an outfit over Brixton way. Cash up front, no questions asked, and a little sweetener for the broker: a brooch which an old warlock had given to a rent-boy he was shagging in the sixties. How Big George got it, I wouldn’t like to ask, but I needed it for some other business, which doesn’t come into this story.

 

It was opening up sweet as a nut. Then Danny, the stupid git, decides to play it clever. Memory’s a cruel bitch. When I think about Danny from now on, it won’t be of the skinny teenager with London in his eyes I knew in the seventies. It’ll be of the bald man with a smug look on his fat face, grinning at Big George and saying that he didn’t think he’d be paying for the goods after all, because otherwise he might get a bit careless, like, and tell some of the lads what he’d found out: that Big George Rooney died in 1989, and that the bloke sitting in front of him was “some sort of fucking impostor”.

 

Well, I could have told him that. Half the mystics in London could have told him that as well. And a five-year old could have told him this: that exiled Lords of the Third Circle who have spent the last two decades on Earth contentedly acting out a Guy Ritchie film take it _very personally_ if they think that someone is about to blow their cover.

 

I was out the door, with the goods in my pocket, by the time the shit hit the fan. But then, that’s what I do. I stashed the brooch in Chas’ lock-up, went out, and got myself some therapy. The sort of therapy that comes in 400 cl bottles, doesn’t charge by the hour, and ditches you on a King’s Cross pavement in the dead of night with a head full of spanners, a mouth full of puke, and no idea how you got there.

 

 _“You leave yourself very vulnerable, for a man of power,”_ Papa Mid-Nite said to me once. And the man had a point, even if he’s a piece of sidewalk art in the Big Apple now and I’m still breathing. Just about.

 

The cabaret issuing from my oesophagus had finally quietened down, and I was wondering how I was going to get back to the bed-sit. That was when I heard the commotion from a nearby alley. Two male voices, raised in anger. I poked my head round the corner to see what was going on.

 

Subsequent events would prove that I slightly misinterpreted what I saw then. It was an easy mistake to make, though. When two blokes in expensive suits are cornering a girl young enough to be their daughter in an alley near King’s Cross at 2 a.m., the odds do not favour the idea that they have all fallen out over the tonal qualities of Rembrandt. The poor little bitch was, I reasoned, obviously on the game, and in over her head with a pair of stroppy punters. A scene like this was probably playing itself out a hundred times that night, on a hundred wind-flensed city streets. I had bigger fish to fry.

 

But…

 

She was barely eighteen. Younger than Gemma. I looked at the empty whisky bottle in my hand.

 

A man could get into trouble, with a temper like mine.

 

 

*****

 

 

“What, no smart remarks?” The bigger man pushed the girl, who stumbled and fell back against the wall. “I’m disappointed. From what I’ve heard, you’ve always got way too much to say. You like lessons, don’t you? Well, here’s one you won’t forget, you jumped up little mu…”

 

So, you’re happily playing the hard man, beating up on a girl half your size with a mate in tow, when suddenly some drunk of indeterminate age lurches round the corner, stinking of Scotch (cheap) and vomit (on the house), and slurring “ ’ullo squire, GET choor Big ISSHooo, oh, sold out, thassa shame, nevermin’…?” What do you do? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

 

You look away.

 

Big mistake.

 

Like I said, he was a tall bloke, but kneeing him in the balls doubled him up nicely so that I could break his nose. That was when I saw the other one reaching into his pocket. Fuck. If I’d known that they were carrying, I might have reconsidered.

 

Leaving the big man on the ground, I charged his mate, bringing my left hand round in an arc. I had been careful to hold it still before, wanting its contents to stay their problem, not mine. First rule in the Glassing Handbook.

 

He clutched at his face, and dropped the piece. The other bloke showed signs of getting up, so I put the boot in. Once because he was an arse-hole, once because I was hung-over, and once because.

 

Stooping, I picked up what the shorter man had dropped. It was not what I had expected: a slim piece of wood about a foot long. As I touched it, I felt what I should have recognized before, if it hadn’t been drowned out by the clamour of conscience and the ringing of the Bell’s.

 

The oldest buzz. Magic.  

 

I looked over at the girl. It would be fair to say that whisky with a street-fight chaser had not left Constantine at his epigrammatic best.

 

“What the _fuck_ is going on?”

 

****

 

Back in the fifties, my old man was a Brylcreem Boy. Now, Constantine Senior was ever one of the great independent bullshit factories (like I said, this was the fifties, before bullshit went nationalized). Even by his standards, though, the idea that sticking great glistening handfuls of elephant come on his head would turn him into Denis Compton was something special. 

 

That was what I used to think, anyway. Age may not make you wiser, but it helps you see what makes other people stupid. In a dead-end job, in a no-hope town, the idea that you can make _anything_ bright and shiny and stay where it’s put has got to have an appeal. Everyone needs a bit of magic. Even a magician.

 

 _Her_ hair was a bloody mess. Not that this was necessarily a disqualification in what I was still hazily thinking of as her line of work. (There’s a market for Distressed Schoolgirl; in the brave Britain of Blair’s third term, there’s a market for anything.) It wasn’t the colour of gold in old paintings, in case you’ve been getting your hopes up. It was dark brown.

 

Pocketing the piece of wood, I reached into my inside pocket for my comb. Which, by the immutable law of the bender, wasn’t there anymore. So I held out my empty hand, awkwardly, thinking, for some reason, of the things I should have said to my dad.

 

“Come on, love. You need to run off home before the Two Ronnies here make a comeback.”

 

“I’m not your ‘love’.” Gingerly, she rose from her crouch by the wall.

 

“Listen, girlie, two punters just got themselves fucked up on account of you. Right now, I’m your only friend in the world. If that doesn’t scare you shitless, it ought to. Here and now, _love_ , you’ll be what you’re told.”

 

She flushed. “Look, thanks for your help and all that, but…”

 

Her eyes widened, and I knew why. Something was coming. A whole lot of something. Nothing you could see, not yet. But the dank London air was full of the promise.

 

“So many.” Her voice was a low, stumbling monotone. “We knew they would turn - we told everyone that they would; _honestly_ , why don’t people ever _listen_? - but who guessed there were so many? I can’t…”

 

It wasn’t that she wasn’t making any sense. I could tell already that she was making only too much, and I didn’t like the shape of it one bit. But I also knew that it wasn’t going to be the sort of sense that was going to stop John Constantine, esq., and his new lady friend getting theirs in the course of their next hundred heartbeats. I pulled her out of the alleyway.

 

“Put your head down, love, and run like fuck. But stay behind me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I know where we’re going.” And, I added mentally, because I can’t run like a lithe teenager, and I don’t want to be the one the bad shit at our back gets to first.

 

Even above the leaden throbbing of my lungs – whoever called them “lights” needed his head examined – I could feel the presences behind us. I could feel them stopping at the alley, where the Two Ronnies were still slumped on the deck. They stopped, but not for very long.

 

Good night from him, and good night from him.


	2. Broken Leads

Three-quarters of the way down Harrison Street, there’s a certain shabby doorway. Most people wouldn’t give it a second look, which is why it’s there. You can build a life in the spaces where second looks should have been.

 

Sherlock Holmes is supposed to have had boltholes, little hideaways scattered all across London. I’ve got one or two of them myself, but whereas he needed places he could pop into and emerge from in two shakes of a rat’s arse as a Harrow drag queen, mine are meant to give me somewhere to go to ground when things go pear-shaped. Which, in my line of work, happens so often I could open a grocery.

 

The one on Harrison Street was not the best of them. Its construction had coincided with a period of serious nicker drought (drinking too much after Newcastle; bookies wising up to the aliases), and I’d cut corners with the protections. Magic’s a lot about front and bullshit, but not entirely. There’s only so much you can do with a couple of stray tomcats and a penknife.

 

Still, any old port in a storm. I bundled Not-My-Love in ahead of me, and slammed the door behind us. The old place still looked like crap, unless you were into Gulag chic, but at least it wasn’t going to hold any more surprises.

 

“Who the FUCK are you and wha… Well, John Constantine, as I live and breathe. Who’s the tart?”

 

 Me and my big interior monologue.

 

Billy Stone was a small-time mystic with, as I now recalled, a certain way with other people’s locks. He was also one of those men that go through life without realizing that tracksuits will never look good on a fat bloke who’s hit thirty without stopping to report the accident. I had first met him in 1980. Since then, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Tories had relinquished their death-grip on the nation’s bollocks, but that bloody tracksuit had stayed the same. Upwards of twenty years, on and off.

 

Mostly off, for quite a chunk of it. Billy had been in for a piece of the action during the business of the Ace of Winchesters, and had come a bit of a cropper as a result. He wasn’t alone in that, of course, not by a long chalk. But Billy fell further and harder than most.

 

“You’re in my place, Billy.” I started rummaging through my pockets for a fag. “Want to tell me why that is?”

 

“Fuck you, Constantine, like you ever fucking bought this gaff, finders fucking keepers that’s what I say, and you fucking owe me anyway, don’t say that you don’t, I should fucking do you, the way you screwed me over…”

 

I lit a cigarette. Billy went on spewing his grievances. I ignored him. The girl looked from one face to the other, opened her mouth, and then thought better of it. I ignored her too.

 

After about a minute, I walked over to the fat man.

 

“Remember Eddy Grimms, Billy?” My tone was quiet and conversational.

 

Billy was thrown. “What, that National Front fucker? Lived over Shoreditch in the 80s, before he had the accident?”

 

“That’s the one.” I blew out. “Terrible business, that was. Do you know, not two days before it happened, he’d shoved a turd through my letterbox on account of I was a ‘Paki-lover’? And they say there’s no justice.”

 

I looked up. Billy had turned a funny colour, but I didn’t hear anyone laughing.

 

“I don’t like shit on my carpet, Billy. Especially when it’s wearing a tracksuit. So I say again, you want to tell me why you’re here? Make it fast, and make it good. Very good.”

 

Billy deflated. “Look, John, I’m sorry for flying off the handle like that, and I know that this is your place, but I was scared out of my fucking wits, and I didn’t know where to go and I would have asked, but you was passed out pissed and…”

 

My head was still throbbing like a dick in a zip. I stubbed out the fag, lit another, and glanced at the girl. She was looking at Billy like he was something that had crawled out of the Reptile House. Can’t say I blamed her.

 

“Go and stick the kettle on, love. Kitchen’s through that door there.”

 

The look in her eyes told me that I was this far from a bollocking, and a good one at that. Then it struck her, as I thought it would, that making the tea would put a wall between her and Billy. His stare super-glued itself to her arse as she walked out.

 

“Bit of alright you’ve got there. Same old Constantine. Where’d you…”

 

“None of your fucking business. So, what put the wind up you?”

 

Billy paled again. “It was awful, John. I was walking down Birkenhead Street about an hour back. I’d been having a drink with the lads, and they’d grabbed a late cab, but I felt like a walk to clear my head. That was when I saw it.”

 

He shut his eyes for a moment.

 

“It must have been eight foot tall. Dressed like a monk, in this ragged black stuff; I couldn’t see the face. Ghost of Christmas Fucking Future. It was about three hundred yards ahead of me.

 

“There were these two drunk birds coming the other way. And suddenly I realized: they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see it, and they were walking right into the fucker, and I’m not a brave man, John, but I didn’t want to see what it would do to them. And somehow, it must of felt that, ’cos it turned around. And somehow it knew that I could see it.”

 

He wiped his forehead with his hand.

 

“That was when I pegged it, and tried to find somewhere to hide. The first place I came to was this shop doorway, and who should I see there but John bloody Constantine, snoring through his own puke. I tried to wake you up, but you were dead to the world. That was when I remembered you had this place. I’ve never moved so fucking fast.”

 

He looked up.

 

“Like I said, John, I’m sorry about this, but I’ve got nowhere else to turn. Don’t turn me out on the streets with _that_ waiting for me, please…”

 

I looked at him through the cigarette smoke, weighing my options, then reached a decision. I tossed him the packet.

 

“You can stay the rest of the night. Bedroom’s upstairs; we’ll be down here. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Billy. You’re not the only one it’s looking for.”

 

 

*****

 

There’s a battle that’s fought, every night, and every night it’s fought a thousand thousand times. Lorry-drivers with two mortgages and six mouths to feed fight it, and security men, and anyone who works the graveyard shift. I’ve fought it. You’ve fought it. The fight where you want nothing more in the world than to lose, because every victory means a bit more pain.

 

The fight to stay awake.

 

She was a tough one, you had to give her that. Looking at her, I guessed that it had been days since she had got any shut-eye, but she sat there in the squalid living room for almost an hour, fighting not to fall asleep. The little sigh she let out as she finally gave in made me think of Kit, and how I always stayed awake to hear that special sigh, because it told me that I wasn’t alone.

 

I gave her about five minutes to drift off completely, and then started going through her pockets.

 

Not a promising haul, all things considered. An empty Coke bottle – to judge from the residue and the smell, though, the last thing to have been emptied from it hadn’t been Coke. A few receipts, which I pocketed for later attention. Some small change. Three locks of hair - one black, one red, and one grey – pressed into an envelope. A page from yesterday’s _Guardian_ , folded up as small as it would go.

 

I unfolded the sheet, and scanned it for anything of interest. Unrest in the Near East; questions in the House of Commons over EC subsidies; a big fraud trial starting at the Old Bailey. Someone had taken it into his head to firebomb a dentist’s, of all places. What sort of a world do we live in, I reflected, where you can’t wage the war on gum disease without some sick little fuck standing you a pint of Mr. Molotov’s Finest?

 

I fished out the receipts again, and looked them over. They were for London hotel bills, all paid over the last few days. In my trade, you get to know a lot of night porters. Billy had left his mobile on the settee. I nipped into the kitchen, and made a couple of calls.

 

“Wotcha, Trev. Constantine. I need to know about a girl who checked into the _Grand_ a couple of nights back…”

 

I lit another fag, and glanced through the door. The girl with the cheap bag and the taste for expensive hotels was still sound-o. I switched my attention back to the  ’phone.

 

“No one of that description? O.K., what about someone ginger, same sort of time? Don’t take that sarky tone with me, Trev. There aren’t that many carrot-tops in the square mile…”

 

In her chair, the girl frowned and murmured in her sleep. From upstairs, through a thick wooden door, I could hear Billy’s thunderous fat man’s snore.

 

“Was there? Cheers. By the by, you want to get to another abattoir; the one on Feather Lane is ripping you off something chronic. Be seeing you.”

 

I hung up, and moved down to the next hotel, and then the next. What I heard confirmed my suspicions. I went back into the living room, and got out some paper and a biro, to try another angle. After a couple of minutes, I looked down at what I’d written, and chucked it away in disgust. This was going to take a specialist. Fortunately, I knew just the man. Sleeping Beauty was prodded into consciousness.

 

“Wake up, love. We need to go and see someone.”

 

“What?” She yawned and stirred. “But, we can’t go outside…not with the dem… those things you were talking about on the loose.”

 

“It’s not far, and you’ll be as safe at his place as you are here. Safer, probably. You wouldn’t want to fuck with Gentlemen Jim on his home turf.”

 

As we left, I shouted up the stairs.

 

“Look after the place while I’m away, Billy. We’re going to see Jim.”

 

“Gentlemen Jim? The copromancer?”

 

“The very same. If anything big and nasty drops by, be sure to give us a good loud death-rattle.”

 

 “Bastard.”


	3. Paying a Visit

London is a people junkie. Like most addicts, she’s not too particular about her poison. So long as they are there and there’s plenty of them, any old shit will do.

 

 But in the small hours, when everyone who’s got somewhere to go has gone, and all that’s whipping through her brick-lined arteries is wind and fast food cartons, there’s the pallor of cold turkey about her. Moisture glistens on her pavements, like sweat gathering on a clammy forehead. I turned up the collar of my coat, and shivered in sympathy.

 

“Why do you want to see this man?” she asked.

 

“’Cos I need to know what’s going down here. Jim’s a seer. One of the best, too.”

 

“Oh.” She sniffed. “ _Divination_. Going to read your tealeaves, is he?”

 

“Such cynicism in one so young. You sure that those twats on your tail aren’t the undercover branch of the Sarcasm Squad?” I checked round another corner. All clear, so far. “And no, he isn’t going to be reading any tealeaves. The last time Gentlemen Jim touched a liquid that wasn’t at least seventy per cent proof, it was because he was blind pissed and fell in the river.”

 

“Another drunk.” She sniffed again; quite the nasal arsenal that girl was packing. “He sounds like _quite_ the gentleman.”

 

“That’s ‘Gentlemen’, not ‘Gentleman’. And they don’t call him that because of what he is…”

 

I came to a halt outside our destination.

 

“…They call him that because of where he works.”

 

*****

 

The slot in the door opened at my knock. A pair of suspicious blood-shot eyes peered out.

 

“This urinal is closed. Can’t you bloody well read? You want a blow job, son, go to Hampstead fucking Heath.”

 

“Tempting offer, Gentlemen, but I think I’ll give it a miss, if you don’t mind.”

 

“John Constantine. Well I never. You’re a sight for sore eyes, I don’t mind telling you.” The door rattled open. “Step into my office.”

 

The little wizened figure of Jim – Rumpelstiltskin’s less ruggedly handsome brother – ushered me in, Her Ladyship having decided that she would keep watch outside. His domain hadn’t changed; but then, it was hard to see any reason why it should. Shadowy, mostly, but from the walls there was the gleam of polished porcelain. The cubicles had that mute threatening look that cubicles the world over share.

 

Jim shuffled over to the tiny kiosk in which he was paid to spend his days and lived to spend his nights. He sat down. I looked round for somewhere I could take a load off as well. I drew a blank, apart from the obvious.

 

“Business or pleasure, Constantine?”

 

“Business, Jim.” I passed over a crumpled twenty. “There’s a girl outside. She’s up to her pert little arse in trouble. Our sort of trouble.”

 

“What do you want to know?”

 

“Who she is, and why she’s a target.”

 

“You tried the usual ways, I suppose?” Gentlemen held the note up to the light, and pocketed it. “Automatic writing? The numbers game?”

 

“Too bleeding right, I did. Recipe for fuck all, every one. And she’s a close-mouthed little mare. Whatever she knows, she isn’t saying. Won’t even own up to a name.”

 

“Smart kid.” He got up, and creaked over to the row of cubicles. “Well, it so happens that the bowl at the far end is ready. I’ll see what I can do.”

 

He tottered in, and shut the door. Presently I heard a flush.

 

Gentlemen Jim - prophecy’s answer to Fanny Craddock -  always has one he made earlier.

 

*****

           

People get the wrong idea about magic. They think it’s all to do with power, and grabbing it where you can. But proper magic – once you strip away the runes and the incanting and all that bollocks – isn’t about power. It’s about weakness. You gather the whispers, and the regrets, and what’s left when all the stuff anyone could possibly want has been taken away, and from that you build what you need.

 

The problem with the usual ways of doing a reading – graphology, arithmancy, the Tarot - is that the world and his wife knows about them. Been there; done that; got the Ouija board. Anyone with an ounce of occult nous can put the kibosh on them. Your average psychic tail is easy to use, and easy to lose.

 

That’s where the likes of Jim come in handy. The only point of contact between him and some old biddy staring at tealeaves is that he gets in through something brown and wet. Something everyone makes, but no one wants. As any bookie will tell you, when you want to make things add up, it helps to work from the lowest common denominator.

 

“You fallen in there, Gentlemen?” I asked after a bit.

 

“Ha bloody ha.” The old man shuffled out. He motioned me out of the way, and, true to his calling, now washed his hands. “Right as usual, Constantine. Something’s blocking the scry, and whoever did it…

 

“…Knew his shit?”

 

“Oh, my aching sides.” Jim resumed his seat in his kiosk. “There was a bit coming through, but not very much. No name, worse luck. She holds the fates of others in her hand, but that’s the sort of mantic cobblers you could get from anyone. What I did find out…,” He looked up at me sharply”…is that _you’re_ part of the plan.”

 

“Hers, or theirs?”

 

“Couldn’t say. But watch yourself on this one, John. Sorry I couldn’t be more use.”

 

“Maybe you still can.” I laid the piece of wood I had nabbed in the alley on the desk. Jim stared at it, but didn’t touch. He was old, and he was wily, and he got to be one by being the other. “You ever heard of anyone using one of these?”

 

“Your actual _magic wand_? Not fucking likely. Only one I can think of is that American sort you used to hang around with. You know the one. Brunette, legs up to here…”

 

“Zatanna?” I picked up the wand again. “Yeah, she’s got one. But with her, it’s just part of her stage bullshit, like the fishnets, and saying her spells backwards. Give ’em the ole razzle-dazzle, that sort of thing. She could cut all that crap out and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. I wish she would.” Pause for thought. “Except the fishnets.” I put it back in my pocket. “These boys looked like they meant it, though.”

 

“Weird. Wait a minute…” Jim pulled his hand across his chin, making a noise like a Brillo pad. “I remember something old Brendan told me once… You ever heard of guild-mages, Constantine?”

 

“Can’t say as I have.”

 

“Neither had I. Brendan told me about them, one night down the _Viaduct_.”

 

“He always was the scholar.”

 

“So he was, the drunken old bastard. I still miss him. Best drinking companion a man could ever have. Not that I need to tell you that.” Jim leaned backwards in his chair. “That night’s pretty hazy, to tell you the truth. All I remember is that we was about eight or nine pints in, when you start to get a bit sentimental, like, and old Brendan, he starts off on one about how fucking lonely it is, doing what we do, but how it hadn’t always been like that, ’cos once upon a time, there’d been a way people could do it together. Guild-mages, the books called ’em. Some old mystics in the dim and distant who stole some power from somewhere and then shared it with each other and their apprentices. Serious shit they could do – transformations, hexing, you name it – but they all needed these wands to channel it, on account of the way the original power was stashed away. Without them, they weren’t good for fuck all.”

 

Jim sucked at his teeth. “Well, I’m ashamed to say that at that point, I told Brendan that he wasn’t getting his hands on my wand in a million years, and he laughed fit to burst, and he thought it was so funny that he told another bloke up at the bar that he wouldn’t want to hold his, either, but the bloke took it the wrong way, like, and tried to stick one on old Brendan, and, well, you can probably guess what happened after that. It stuck in my head, all the same. But if what the old bastard said was right, they all disappeared centuries back. You want to find out about guild-mages, John, you’re going to need to ask someone as old as dirt.”

 

“Could be. Thanks a lot, Jim. You look after yourself.”

 

“Will do. Here, Constantine…”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“You left that girl outside, you said?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“How did you know she wouldn’t do a runner when your back was turned?”

 

“’Cos I knew the nosy little mare would want to eavesdrop on every word we said.” I opened the door. She had enough front not to have bothered to move away, but her cheeks were still scarlet. Jim made her an arthritic bow, and shut up behind us.


	4. Dance with a Stranger

I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes after we left Jim’s. I didn’t have to. Those mugs in the alley hadn’t known what they were playing at. Beat the crap out of this girl and she’d stay as silent as the grave. Even if it meant ending up in one. But make her look like a fool…

 

“You think you know everything, don’t you?”

 

Gotcha.

 

“You think that you and your grubby little mates and their sordid hedge magic can work out what’s going on. You don’t have a clue. You don’t have the faintest idea.”

 

“Don’t I? So, love… visited any good hotels lately?”

 

She came to a dead halt, just under a street lamp.

 

“Thought that would get your attention.” I didn’t move forward to join her in the light. Not yet. “I put in some ’phone calls, while you were asleep. A friend of mine who works reception in Pall Mall told me that a girl like you walked in and booked a room a couple of days back, in the name of Leda Hunt. Funny thing is, he never saw her leave. The only person who came down from her room was a ginger kid with freckles.”

 

“You went through my bag.” The girl’s voice was toneless. I ploughed on.

 

“Now, another mate of mine – different hotel – says that a ginger lad booked a room at _his_ place the day afterwards. Went upstairs, never seen again. The bill was paid by an elderly Scottish woman who came down instead, leaving the name of Helen Simons.” Her face held no expression. That wouldn’t last. “So I asked myself, what sort of person pulls a scam like that? And that was when I knew.”

 

“You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know who I am.” Her voice was still under control, but only just.

 

“I don’t have to, love, because I know _what_ you are, and that’s what counts. You’re the smart one.”

 

I stepped forward.

 

“You’re the one they go to, when there’s a problem too big for them to handle. And you sigh and moan and roll your eyes, but you do it for them anyway. Because that’s what makes you feel alive. The buzz, the score. Having a brainchild and bringing it to term.”

 

She looked me up and down. Looked at where half a century of being the smart one gets you.

 

“And then, of course, it all turns to shit. Because no matter how sharp you know you are, there’s always an angle you haven’t covered. There’s always someone who gets hurt, because you weren’t quite smart enough. Your brainchild is a cold wet miscarriage in your hands, and they’re all looking at you. All blaming you.”

 

She flushed, and shut her eyes. “I’m not like you.”

 

“Really?” I pulled the newspaper page out of my pocket, and started reading. “‘Police are still seeking the whereabouts of the arsonist responsible for the critical injury of two dentists in…’”

 

I didn’t get to finish the sentence. It wasn’t so much her scream of “I’M NOT LIKE YOU” as the right hook to my jaw that came with it. The darkness swallowed her as she fled.

 

I nursed my jaw, and glanced at my watch. Four-thirty. Probably time for a fag before she got back. There was a ghost of a chance that she would bolt for good, but that wasn’t likely. I was banking that…

 

“…That the child will succumb to her loneliness, and see in you, as you have designed, a kindred spirit to whom she may bare her soul. As it was said of you long ago, so it remains: you are a cruel and deceitful man, John Constantine.”

 

Trilby hat tilted against the light that will not warm him; cloak furled close against the night that will not chill him. I stopped rubbing my face, sighed, and looked up into those white familiar eyes.

 

“Might’ve known you’d hove into view. Hello, Stranger.” I probed at my jaw again; the throbbing had subsided a bit. “I don’t see what you’re getting so worked up about. It can’t be news to you that I’m a bastard.”

 

“Were you a plain villain, the offence would be less. But that you call upon your own humanity and better nature, the bond you share with the child, and make them perform for you like some carnival bear…therein lies the offence.”

 

“Suit yourself. Look, it must still be office hours somewhere on this sick old world; can’t you find some caped crusaders to go and cryptic at?”

 

“My concern is with the child. And with you.”

 

“Don’t see why.” I lit up a fag. “You of all people should know that I’ll find out what’s going on. It’s what I do.”

 

“Of a surety. If one wishes aught to be discovered, one seeks John Constantine. This is common knowledge.”

 

I looked up sharply. He never explains anything, of course. Be thrown out of the Yoda union if he did, most likely. But if you know how to read the inflections, and join the dots…

 

“I see what you’re getting at. But that wouldn’t add up, unless they thought she was a… Oh. _Now_ it makes sense.”

 

I scratched my head.

 

“Well, that puts a different slant on things. I’m going to need some heavy-duty backup. You get around a bit, Stranger…could you take a message?”

 

“To whom?”

 

“Take a guess.”

 

He bent his head. “Do you think, after all that has passed between you, that that one will see fit to aid you?”

 

 “I’m not asking him to. All I want is for him to be at a particular place at a particular time, and listen to what happens. He can make up his own mind then.”

 

“Very well. It will be done.”

 

I gave him the time and the place. I heard footsteps around the corner. She was coming back faster than I had expected.

 

“Any road, thanks for the heads up. I know you’re not the type to keep score, but I owe you one. Don’t be a strang…”

 

“Who are you talking to?”

 

I looked backwards. The street, as I might have guessed, was empty. He always did have a thing for flashy exits. I turned back to the girl.

 

“Wotcha, princess. Come back for Round Two?”

 

“I’m sorry I hit you. I…I have to tell you something…”

 

“I know.” I put away the fags, and sighed. “And I also know why I can’t let you.”


	5. One Good Deed Dying Tongueless

 

Russell Square Gardens is only five minutes on foot from Harrison Street. It isn’t very big, and it takes some scrambling to get into it during the small hours. But for what I had in mind, it would do.

 

I saw Billy staggering into view before he laid eyes on me. He was out of shape and middle-aged; even the short walk from Harrison Street had left him in a bad way. He was wheezing and groaning, drinking the dank night air in great gasps, like it was champagne. Fat men are alive in a way the rest of us will never know. I stepped out to meet him.

 

“What the fuck are you playing at, Constantine? Why couldn’t we meet at the flat? Every time I think I see a shadow move, I jump out of my skin. I nearly crapped myself when you rang my mobile.”

 

“You’ll see why we’re here in a minute, Billy.” The flame of my lighter flared and went out. I puffed on the fag. “But before we cut to the chase, there’s a question I want answered.”

 

Billy licked his lips. His eyes flickered from left to right.

 

“What did you do with my comb?”

 

“I don’t know what you mean…” It came out too fast, too pat. If I’d had any doubts, that would have killed them stone dead.

 

“Yes, you do, Billy. The comb you took off me for your new mates, when you found me passed out pissed a few hours back.” I breathed out the smoke. “I’d like it back, if you don’t mind. Sentimental associations, and all that.”

 

“What are you on about, Constantine? Are you off your fucking head again or…”

 

“You know, I’m almost impressed, Billy. I wouldn’t have thought a no-hoper like you would’ve had it in him. I mean, I knew from the start that you were trying to pull some sort of a number. You’ve wanted to screw me over ever since the Ace of Winchesters. But you _could_ have just scragged me when I was puking my guts out in the street, and I wanted to know why you didn’t. Because of course, that’s what I do. Find things out. And that’s what they were counting on.”

 

They were here now. I could feel them. Whispers on the cusp of hearing. Shadows on the brink of sight. Billy’s new gang. Billy grinned a tight little grin. On his fat face, it looked like a razor scar.

 

“You always were full of it, Constantine. The Arthur Daley of the occult. Take away the coat and the attitude, and what are you? Just a common, clueless little Scouse fuck.”

 

“Yeah, common as muck, that’s me.” I leaned back, and felt the presences. Four or five of them. Good. I wanted them to see what was coming next. “Never had no proper education, y’honour. The sort who wouldn’t know a Secret Keeper if she bit him on the arse.”

 

Billy’s smirk vanished.

 

“’Cos that’s what you think she is, don’t you? A Secret Keeper. As long as she keeps mum, your mates can’t find who she’s protecting. They could walk past them on the street, and not see them. Must tear your boys apart, knowing that. So you did everything you could to flush her out. Make her tell. You went after her family, set light to their home…” I raised my voice for the other audience, the one I’d sent for. “You must have thought it would break her, seeing everything she loved go up in flames.”

 

“Yeah. Fat lot of good that did.” Billy picked his nose. “They’re in hospital now, her parents. Third-degree burns, the both of them.” He spat it out with relish. “Cold little bitch hasn’t gone anywhere near them.”

 

“So you tracked her down to King’s Cross, and that was where you had your stroke of luck. John Constantine, semi-conscious in a doorway. Your mates arranged for her to be chased where she would run into me. You were the inside man, to work the switch once me and my knack for secrets made her tell. That was where the comb came in, of course. Without a bit of my hair, you wouldn’t be able to glamour yourself as me, after she spilled.”

 

I turned up my coat against the dawn wind.

 

“Like I said, it was a good plan, Billy. But this is where it ends.”

 

“How right you are.”

 

I squinted at what he was clutching in his hand. “You want to be careful how you’re holding that, Billy. You could have someone’s eye out.”

 

“Shut it, Constantine.” He brandished the wand. “Not such a big man now, eh? And don’t try to bullshit me. I know that you haven’t brought any of your demons to fight for you. My…associates have been watching the Other Sides since before you got here.”

 

“Thought they might.” I glanced over Billy’s shoulder. “Which is why I asked _him_ to drop by and hear your little story of innocents aflame. Death by fire is something he takes rather personally, you see. And he didn’t have to come from the Other Sides. He was already here. Billy, Billy. Why do you think I brought you to the _Green_?”

 

He had been forming out of the ground while the two of us were talking. You wouldn’t think that something that big could make so little noise. Billy turned…

 

Look back at a life. Two decades growing up in the arse-end of nowhere, three after that of loss and betrayal and deceit. What makes it all worth it? What makes me go on doing what I do?

 

You might say that I do it because no one else would. Because humanity is the race of earth, which Hell wants to walk all over, and Heaven wouldn’t muddy its feet by touching. That I do it because someone has to look out for the people without the wish to be evil, or the chance to be good.

 

And maybe there’s something in that. On my good days. But most days, I do it for that little noise in the back of the throat the mark makes. Human or demon or whatever, it’s always the same. When they realise that you’ve fucked them over good and proper, and there isn’t the slightest fucking thing they can do about it.

 

Billy made that sound. He didn’t have time to make much else, apart from brown underwear. The black weight at the edge of perception lifted. Billy’s former mates clearly weren’t keen on what they were seeing, and had decided to make tracks.

 

 When it was over, I walked across to my guest.

 

“Thanks again, big guy.”

 

“This…was not…for you…Constantine. It is…. _never_ …for you. Farewell.”

 

He’s a thing of few words. Just as well, considering the time it takes for him to get them out. I left.

 

After about five minutes, I came back for my comb.

 

*****

 

“They carry grudges, my enemies.” The girl looked out over the concourse of King’s Cross Station. Even at eight am, it was already full. She turned back to me. “Aren’t you afraid that they will come after you?”

 

“Not now that they’ve got a load of my minder. You and I know that he didn’t do it for me, but _they_ don’t. ‘Arthur Daley of the occult’, my arse. If Arthur Daley had had the Jolly Green Giant watching his back instead of Terry, maybe he’d actually have shifted some of those bloody motors.”

 

Her blank expression made me feel my age. I might as well have been talking in Sanskrit. I sighed, and handed her a piece of paper. She inspected it critically.

 

“What’s this?”

 

“Magic words.”

 

“‘ _Prince’s Pleasure_ in the four-fifteen at Newmarket… _Roman Holiday_ in the two-twenty at Kempton Park…’ They don’t look very magic to me.”

 

“As I’ve been trying to tell you, love, there’s more than one sort of magic.” Past our seats, the wan-faced commuters trudged in submissive stream, wheat pouring to the daily grind. “Your people are going to need some dosh. Waltz into a bookie’s looking sweet and innocent – don’t strain yourself, mind – and put everything you’ve got on those horses. Don’t say I sent you.”

 

“Thank you.” She tucked the paper away in her coat. “For all you’ve done. It’s a shame I can’t tell you everything.”

 

“What, like the fact that you’re _not_ the Secret Keeper?”

 

She opened her mouth, and shut it again.

 

“Come on, love. You’re a smart kid, but you were leaving a trail across London a blind man could follow. My mate Chas could have followed it, and _he_ thinks Spurs are a cert for the Double. No, you _wanted_ them to chase you. Even if it meant a death in the night, with no one to know about it.”

 

“‘One good deed dying tongueless slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.’”

 

“Do what?”

 

“It’s Shakespeare. _The Winter’s Tale_.”

 

“I’ll take your word for it.”

 

“I thought I’d been so careful…that the ruse would take everyone in.”

 

She looked crestfallen, and very young. Once again, I found myself thinking of Gemma.

 

“It took in everyone it needed to. You don’t have to be smarter than the world, love. You just have to be smarter than whoever you’re standing next to.”

 

“I see.” She got up, and smiled down at me. “Mr. Constantine…”

 

“Yeah…”

 

“I think that I should go and stand somewhere else.”

 

She turned, and was lost in the crowd. I levered myself to my feet, and went to look for another ’phone booth, weaving haphazardly through the morning throng. Some of them looked pissed off because they were hung-over, which was good to see. One or two even looked pissed off because they weren’t, which was better. I pushed in the change.

 

“Chas? It’s John. Yes, I do know what fucking time it is, but that doesn’t stop me from needing some wheels sharpish. How fast can you get to King’s Cross? I was up all night with an eighteen year-old, and hardly got a wink of sleep. No, honestly, mate. I mean…would I lie to you?”

 

FINIS

 


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